Narration and Narrator Services:

What is Voiceover Narration and Who is the Narrator?

What is narration? What is a narrator? What is voice over narration? Good questions. Many young voice over actors and actresses start off in the business thinking they have to vonvey the whole story with their voices. Sometimes using bombastic voices, other times trying to be so intimate with their voice over narration that the story all but disappears.

You see, the words tell the story. The role of the voice over artist is to just pass the words through their mouth without judgement. As long as the meaning is in their head, the meaning is in their voice.

These days, narration covers everything from

Powerpoint presentations
Flash presentations
Corporate training videos
Documentaries
e-Learning programs
on-hold messages
Anything that needs to be narrated.

To change the voice narrator subject back to the original question posted by Lance, I found describing my narrating techniques best this way:

Definitions of narrator on the Web: someone who tells a story . In fiction, a narrator is a voice or character who tells the story. The narrator generally can be divided into several types. The teller of a story. The narrator may be the author or a character in the story through whom the author speaks. Huckleberry Finn is the narrator of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry

The implied voice relating the characters and the action of the plot to the implied reader. The narrator can be a character, which makes that narrator involved. If the narrator is not a character and takes a position of revealing information to the reader, that narrator is omniscient. An omniscient narrator can either take the reader inside the consciousness of the character, or is privileged, or can remain distant, or not privileged. A narrator that seems to be biased, misleading, provides faulty information or otherwise is not telling the whole story is said

The personage who 'tells' the story in a narrative work. Like the persona, the narrator should not be confused with the author. It may also be useful for you to think about the difference between narrative, narration and the narrator. (In addition to the entry on point of view below, see also the section on point of view in the notes to lecture 11 of my Literary Stylistics

One who communicates a story. There are many varieties of narrators and categories of narration. The narrator inThe Lion often interrupts his own story to give his viewpoints and comments to the reader. The narrator should not be confused with the author. theliterarylink.com/definitions.html The person telling the story. This may be the author, assuming a full knowledge of characters and their feelings: this is an omniscient narrator. It might alternatively be a fictional character invented by the author. There may also be multiple narrators. You should always be prepared to make a clear distinction between Author, Narrator, and Character - even though in some texts these may be (or appear to be) the same. The person telling a story, also referred to as the persona.

One who narrates or tells, a story. A writer may choose to have a story told by a first person narrator, someone who is either a major or minor character. Or, a writer may choose to use a third person narrator, someone who is not in the story at all. Third person narrators are often omniscient, or "all knowing"- that is, they are able to enter into the minds of all the characters in the story. The agent who tells or "shows" a story. There are different narrative points of view. Some narratives are told in retrospect by a character employing a first-person perspective; as a narrator, he or she can be termed an internal narrator. Other narratives are told by a narrator external to the story, who may or may not refer to him- or herself as "I." Such external narrators can be omniscient, that is, have access to the minds of all the characters, or have limited mental access, being restricted to the inner view of, say, only one character. An external narrator, the person through whose voice or viewpoint the story is told. The author may choose a character from the story to act in this capacity, speaking in the first person as if he or she had been present during the action or at least aware of much of what was happening. The author herself may be the "omniscient narrator," a designation that refers to a nameless observer who knows about all the characters and has insight into their emotions, actions, and motivation. www.seniornet.org/php/default.php the character who "tells" the story. The speaker, the person who tells what happens in a poem or a story. The narratorÔs views and experiences may be those of the poet, but it would be a mistake to assume that this is always the case. There are many different sorts of narrator: a first person narrator who tells the story for himself or herself using the pronoun ÍIÔ. a third person narrator who tells a story about other people using the pronouns ÍheÔ, ÍsheÔ and ÍtheyÔ. an omniscient narrator who can tell the reader about everything in the story, including the thoughts and feelings of

the voice of the speaker in a story the one telling the story. One who tells, or is assumed to be telling, the story in a given narrative. legends of the old plantation narrator

The voice and implied speaker of a fictional work, to be distinguished from the actual living author. For example, the narrator of Joyce's "Araby" is not James Joyce himself, but a literary fictional character created expressly to tell the story. Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" contains a communal narrator, identified only as "we." See Point of view.

The person who tells the story.

The person or voice telling the story. The narrator can be a character in the story or a voice outside the action. See Point of view

the voice that fills in the details of the story by introducing scenes and revealing points of the story that cannot be made clear in other ways